SOURCE: Stillinger, Jack. Introduction to Zelauto: The Fountaine of Fame, 1580, edited by Jack Stillinger, pp. vii-xxix. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.

[In the following excerpt, Stillinger provides a thorough examination of Munday's Zelauto, assessing the nature of the work and its merit.]

Anthony Munday's single original contribution to Elizabethan prose fiction appeared in 1580 with the following title page:

ZELAVTO. / THE FOVN- / taine of Fame. / Erected in an Orcharde / of Amorous Aduentures. / Containing / A Delicate Disputation, gallantly / discoursed betweene two noble / Gentlemen of Italye. / Giuen for a freendly entertainment / to Euphues, at his late ariuall / into England. / By A. M. Seruaunt to the Right Ho- / nourable the Earle of Oxenford. / Honos alit Artes. / Imprinted at London by Iohn / Charlevvood. 1580.

Chronologically it is the fifth or sixth of the Elizabethan novels, following Gascoigne's “The Adventures of Master F. J.” (1573), Grange's The Golden Aphroditis (1577), Lyly's Euphues. The Anatomy of Wyt (1578), Gosson's The Ephemerides of Phialo (1579), and probably also Lyly's Euphues and His England (1580).¹ Never entered in the Stationers' Register,² never reprinted, it survives in a single copy in the Bodleian Library.

Almost none of the early novels has been more neglected by scholars. J. J. Jusserand gave it a brief paragraph in The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare;³ J. W. H. Atkins (The Cambridge History of English Literature) and E. A. Baker (The History of the English Novel) mentioned only its title; and a 1913 article by Friedrich Brie showing that Part III of the novel contains an analogue to the bond story of The Merchant of Venice⁴ drew little attention to it as a piece of fiction. In fact, the total body of criticism may be said to consist of three plot summaries and a few paragraphs on its style.⁵ There is no scholarly or critical treatment corresponding to the articles on the novels of Gascoigne and Grange, or even to the criticism available on Gosson's Ephemerides, the only other of the early novels not to have been reprinted.⁶ The neglect of Zelauto is, in part at least, undeserved.

Living as long as he did (1560-1633), Munday could have written a string of books reflecting all the trends in the course of Elizabethan fiction. As it is, he managed to embody most of them in his one novel. The first of the novelists who had no university training, he was reading romances of chivalry, writing ballads, working as a printer's apprentice, and possibly acting on the stage while Lyly, Gosson, and others were absorbing the euphuistic lectures of the Oxford Greek Reader John Rainolds;⁷ and he was outside England for a year before he wrote the novel.⁸ Largely because of these facts, Zelauto differs in several ways from its predecessors. It is, to be sure, a euphuistic novel, but it is much more than an imitation of Lyly's best sellers. Juxtaposed with its euphuism and courtly love concerns are elements of chivalric romance and pastoralism, and even hints of the realism that became prominent in the fiction of the next decade.

In structure, Zelauto represents a considerable advance over the earlier novels. This is not to say that Munday deliberately planned an elaborate form, and in any event the novel is a fragmentary work, ending abruptly after Part III. Brought to completion, however, it could have been one of the most structurally sophisticated novels of the period. Its framework is established in the first ten or twelve pages of Part I. Zelauto, son of the Duke of Venice, leaves home on what is to be a six-year adventure in search of fame. Traveling first to Naples, then to Spain and Portugal, he meets a company of English merchants who describe their country and queen so attractively that he accompanies them home. He spends a year in England, and then departs for Persia. “In processe of time,” Munday tells us, “he had visited many straunge Countryes, sustayned many and wonderful iniuryes among the Turkes, which after shall be declared” (p. 12).⁹ Arriving in Sicily in the sixth year of his travels, he encounters a savage hermit named Astraepho, who, after attacking him fiercely, becomes his “poore hoste” upon learning that he has tales of the world to tell. The two eat a midday meal, after which they discourse at length on the virtues of simple entertainment and contented living. Then Zelauto tells Astraepho the first of his adventures.

Such is the framework on which Munday arranges the stories that make up the bulk of the novel. In the remainder of Part I, Zelauto describes his travels from the beginning to the point at which he leaves England for Persia; Part I ends when the two men retire to supper. Part II begins the next morning with Zelauto's narration of his adventures in Persia, and ends when Astraepho excuses himself to prepare dinner. To keep Zelauto pleasantly occupied until dinnertime Astraepho gives him a story to read. This “Delycate Deuise,” which in itself has nothing to do with either Zelauto or Astraepho, forms the whole of Part III, after which the novel breaks off, and Munday informs the reader he “shall haue the rest as possibilitie can permyt me.”¹⁰

The structure in some ways resembles that of the epic poem. Like Odysseus, Zelauto is well toward the end of his travels when the story begins. Somewhat like Homer's hero, he lands on an island and is discovered by one of its inhabitants, to whom he relates his past adventures, the telling of which constitutes the greater portion of the work. Completing his story, Munday would have brought Zelauto's adventures up to date, and then described his journey home and reception there. The digressive tale of Part III (which seems to have been included only to extend the work to book length) might, in this hypothetical over-all scheme, be considered no more damaging to the unity of the work than the similar digressions characteristic of the epic.

Although Zelauto's adventures are not especially interesting, Munday presents them skillfully. Mingled with Zelauto's narration of the past there is constant reference to his situation in the present: Zelauto may stop his tale to ask Astraepho's judgment in some matter, or Astraepho may interrupt with a question or a few words of admiration. We never forget that it is Zelauto, not Munday, who is telling the story, and that Zelauto's adventures are not complete, like those of the narrators of Utopias, but are still in progress, since he has yet to get from Sicily back to his father's court. The frequent transitions from past to present also enable Munday to pass smoothly from one incident to another, and to skip whatever intervening details he wishes to avoid.

The most obvious fault of the structure is the repetition that it produces. Zelauto relates to Astraepho some of the facts that Munday has already given the reader in establishing the framework of the novel, and Zelauto repeats some of these details once or twice within the stories that he tells to Astraepho. But regardless of its success or failure, the structure in 1580 was the most ambitious in Elizabethan fiction. Taking into consideration the tale of Part III, we have three levels of narrative in the novel: Munday tells the entire story to the reader; within Munday's story there is Zelauto's narration to Astraepho and their dialogue; finally there is the narrative of Part III, a story which Astraepho has written down and which, through Zelauto's “perusal” of it, is relayed to the reader of the novel. A similar narrative complexity does not appear in Elizabethan fiction until Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, fourteen years later.

Zelauto's adventures, as he describes them to Astraepho, may be detailed here in brief space. Outside Naples, he encounters outlaws who wound him, rob him of clothes and money, and slay his companion. He manages to crawl into the city, where “At last, hauing espyed an Osteria: I boldly entered, putting my selfe in the handes of God, to whome I referred the paying of my charges” (p. 21). The hostess of the inn, Mistress Ursula, gives him the best room in the house, entertaining him elegantly despite the fact that he has no money. With pleasant discourse Zelauto and Ursula pass the time necessary for his recovery; she sings him a love song, hinting that he is to interpret it literally. When fully healed, he departs, having secured money and another companion through a friend living in Naples, and quickly travels to Valencia, Seville, and Lisbon, where he comes upon the merchants with whom he sails to England. In London he is received by a fellow countryman, and introduced by him to gentlemen of the English court. After a time he sees Queen Elizabeth, and attends some pageants and tournaments given for her. Having told this much, Zelauto reads to Astraepho an account he has written of a tournament in which an armed lady challenges and unhorses a knight who has disparaged the queen's beauty. He recites verses that he wrote in praise of the queen and “a certayne Noble Lorde” (the Earl of Oxford), and then tells that he reluctantly left England to continue his travels. Part I concludes with his promise to tell of “the myseries that I poore soule abode among the tyrannous Turkes.”

Dealing with only one incident, the second part is less rambling and correspondingly more interesting. Zelauto arrives in heathen Persia and lodges at an inn where the hostess is a Florentine and a Christian, and her husband a prospective convert to Christianity. Losing no time, he is well along toward effecting the host's conversion when Mica Sheffola, a nephew to the Sultan, enters the inn, lamenting that his sister has been condemned to die the next morning for “her Christian beleefe, and constant auouching of the same” (p. 76). Hearing that the Sultan has offered to free her if any champion can defeat his son in a trial of arms, Zelauto agrees to come forward with a challenge. On the morrow he enters the lists, and after a lengthy speech slays his opponent. The Sultan puts him and his host into prison under sentence of death. The host is hanged the next morning, but Zelauto is rescued by Mica Sheffola, who arranges his escape and sends him toward Constantinople with money and a new companion. Part II, with all that we hear of Zelauto's adventures, ends at this point.

I have found no specific literary sources for Parts I and II, although the events in them are so simple that none is needed. General similarities to Euphues and its sequel readily suggest themselves: both Zelauto and Euphues are young noblemen who leave home to see the world; both visit Naples and eventually England, where they are struck with admiration for the queen. But resemblances in plot go no further. More important are the details that came from Munday's own experience, especially from his trip to Italy in the year before the novel was published. Of the various reasons claimed for this journey, only Munday's need concern us.¹¹ As stated in The English Romayne Lyfe (1582), his purpose was “to see straunge Countreies, as also affection to learne the languages … and not any other intent or cause.”¹² Zelauto gives more or less the same reason for his travels five times in the novel. Zelauto's encounter with Neapolitan outlaws is based on Munday's own experience with a group of disbanded soldiers who attacked him and left him stripped and moneyless shortly after he landed on the continent. At various times Zelauto calls on his countrymen in foreign lands, receives money by means of letters, and falsifies his identity, all of which Munday did during his journey. Zelauto is handsomely treated whenever he stops at an inn, and even in Persia he gets “the best and pleasauntest Chamber in the prison” (p. 100); these details, along with Ursula's charge against “common Inholders, and those tipling Tauerners” (pp. 26-27) in a discourse with Zelauto, reflect Munday's less fortunate experiences in traveling from inn to inn on the continent.¹³ The entire episode of what might be called the Christian underground in Persia roughly parallels Munday's experiences among Catholics in Rome. Finally, the brief description of the execution and mutilation of Zelauto's Persian host (p. 102) could have been suggested by several executions that Munday witnessed in London and Rome; the scenes in which the condemned lady is led to her death (p. 87) and Zelauto escapes from prison (pp. 104-05) are also well enough detailed to have come from personal observation or experience.

Munday's acquaintance with chivalric romances enters significantly into the novel.¹⁴ Zelauto's quest for fame, with its six-year time limit, is a chivalric motif, as is the standard set of questions—name, nation, and parentage—that he is asked many times in the course of his travels. Two knightly contests, conducted with all the standard formalities, occur in the novel, one between the armed lady and the rude knight who discredits Elizabeth's beauty, the other between Zelauto and the Sultan's son. Might is equated with right, as often in the romances, when the loser of the first contest is forced to realize that he held a wrong opinion; and much is made, after the second contest, of the Sultan's violation of a law of arms by punishing Zelauto for slaying his opponent in a fair fight. Munday is the first Elizabethan novelist to use themes and incidents from the chivalric romance, themes that become prominent a few years late in Sidney's Arcadia and, less happily, in the novels of Emanuel Ford. Not the least of the influences of the chivalric romance is a formal one: Zelauto is the earliest English novel to have chapter divisions.¹⁵

Munday also sounds the first pastoral note in English fiction—again, however, primarily under the influence of the continental romances, in which pastoralism was increasingly intermixed with the old chivalric themes. Zelauto's and Astraepho's several discourses on contented living and the virtues of simple, rural life as contrasted with the vanity and superfluity of courtly life are stock themes of the Renaissance pastoral. Astraepho has deliberately renounced the life of a courtier, and Zelauto, like Sir Calidore in The Faerie Queene, comes very close to doing the same thing. The ending of Part I, when Astraepho says “it draweth now towarde night. … Let vs now goe in, and prouide something for our Supper,” is a standard pastoral termination; and the following outburst by Astraepho embodies a common pastoral motif: “Now to the sprouting sprayes I commend my sute, the Hylles, the Dales, the Rockes, the Clyffes, the Cragges, yea, and the gallant Ecchoes resound of this solitary Wyldnesse, they and none but they can witnesse of my woe” (p. 63).

Other influences may be seen. The great body of courtesy literature, for example, lies behind one long discourse on hospitality (pp. 26-27), two passages touching the proper conduct of princes (pp. 9, 89-90), and a discussion of the relationship between virtue and nobility (p. 46); almost no word is used more often by Zelauto than “courtesy.” A single instance of the courtly love influence so pervasive in Part III appears in Part I when Munday adapts the phraseology of the love plaint to the armed lady's extravagant praise of the queen: “What dooth the Gods delude mee? or hath the infernall ghosts enchaunted me with their fonde illusions? Wake I, or sleepe I? See I, or see I not? What chaunce hath conuicted me? What sodayne sight hath attaynted me? Is this a Goddesse, or a mortall creature?” (p. 41). Essentially, however, Parts I and II are the product of euphuistic plot, Munday's own experience, chivalric romance, and (if it can be separated from the romance) the pastoral.

While Part III, the “Amorous discourse” that Astraepho gives Zelauto to read, is more skillfully connected to the rest of the novel than Lyly's extraneous material in Euphues, it is nevertheless entirely different from the other two parts.¹⁶ It was probably written earlier; otherwise it would be difficult to explain why Munday devoted his time to a new story instead of completing Zelauto's adventures. On the other hand, as a piece of fiction it is much more sophisticated than Parts I and II. To a certain extent it has a literary source in a way in which the others apparently do not.

The hero of the story is Strabino, son of a gentleman of Pescara, who goes to Verona to be trained in one of the academies. There he becomes sworn brother of a fellow student, Rodolfo, whose sister Cornelia is “in all poynts so well proportioned: that the lookes of her Amorous countenaunce, infected in the heart of Strabino … a Feuer so fantasticall: that none but only shee must be the curer thereof” (p. 114). He finds himself in the worst agonies of love, but soliloquy and discourse bring him no remedy. Meanwhile another wooer, Signor Truculento, an old and miserly usurer of the city, visits Cornelia's father, Signor Ruscelli, bringing costly gifts to forward his suit for her hand in marriage. Ruscelli, “beeing one him selfe that preferred money before manly modestie” (p. 148), readily accepts Truculento's proposal. Cornelia vows death before such a match, but Ruscelli promises the dismayed Truculento that she will change her mind.

Cornelia accepts Strabino's suit shortly afterward, explaining that she rejected him earlier only for fear that he “might haue alleadged my minde to be lyght” (p. 153). Following her plan to appease her father and serve Truculento as he deserves, Strabino borrows four thousand ducats from Truculento, buys Ruscelli a jewel, and gains his consent to their marriage. Rodolfo woos and wins Truculento's daughter, Brisana, and the two couples celebrate a double wedding, momentarily forgetful of the bond that both young husbands have signed, involving not only the forfeiture of their lands but the loss of both their right eyes if Strabino fails to repay Truculento on time.

Enraged to learn that he has been tricked out of daughter, ducats, and marriage with Cornelia, Truculento hales Strabino and Rodolfo into court for nonpayment of the debt. Strict justice is to be administered, Truculento will have his bond, and the two young men are about to lose their eyes when Cornelia and Brisana, attired as scholars, come forward in court to defeat Truculento through legal technicalities. Seeing no remedy, Truculento accepts Rodolfo as his son-in-law. “Thus were they on all partes verie well pleased, and euerie one accoumpted him selfe well contented” (p. 180).

Chiefly three types of literature underlie this story. The first, courtly love romance, which Munday inherited as a part of the chivalric tradition, is one of the commonest phenomena in Renaissance literature. In a thesis on the euphuistic novel, John Weld has given a formula for this kind of romance as it appears subsequently in English:

Typically a young man meets a young woman and is ensnared by her beauty. With the artful aid of schemata and his commonplace book he tells her of his love. She fears to be thought too forward and rejects him, reminding him of the faithlessness of Jason, Theseus, and Aeneas. A debat d'amour may be held, allowing the hero to display his knowledge of natural and classical history. The characters retire to their respective chambers for euphuistic self-analysis. Then like a valiant soldier unwilling to be daunted by the first repulse, the hero again pleads his love by letter, poem, or speech. So it goes.¹⁷

Weld's formula essentially describes what happens in the first half of Munday's story.

The second type of literature underlying the story is the jestbook, which affects not only incident and character, but style, as I shall point out later. The verbal trickery with which Strabino wins Signor Ruscelli's consent is typical of the way in which jestbook situations are resolved. He presents Ruscelli with a jewel, and secures a promise from him for a jewel in return. The jewel he seeks is, of course, Cornelia. Perceiving his object, Ruscelli tries to back out of the agreement; but when Strabino holds him to his promise, he can only give his blessing to the couple. The aged and comic wooer Truculento is a stock jestbook character, and Cornelia, with all her cleverness, exhibits some of the characteristics of the jestbook heroine.

It is difficult to tell just where the jestbook influence ends and the third influence, that of the Italian novella, takes over, for the two have much in common.¹⁸ The novella is at least responsible for the bond story. Munday's specific source, like Shakespeare's in The Merchant of Venice, is not known. It was some form of the pound-of-flesh story, of which Giovanni Fiorentino's version in Il Pecorone is the most familiar example. Two scholars suggest that Munday may have seen a dramatized version, perhaps the play mentioned by Gosson in 1579 called “The Jew … representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and the bloody minds of usurers.”¹⁹ Munday's biographer has praised his version of the story for representing Truculento as a Christian instead of a Jew, thus enabling him to play rival suitor to Strabino.²⁰ But although this modification gives him a good motive for his hatred once he is tricked, it destroys his motive for making the gruesome bond in the first place, when he still looks on Rodolfo, Strabino's surety, as a potential brother-in-law. Indeed, the chief weakness of the story is that Rodolfo himself not only volunteers the terms of the bond, but almost has to argue Truculento into agreement. Munday handles the point so clumsily as to suggest that making the villain a Christian was his own idea.

Munday's style and ability in characterization remain to be discussed. Since Zelauto is usually listed among imitations of Euphues, it would be worth while to examine the extent of Munday's debt to Lyly. As its title page, epistle to the reader, and closing salutation proclaim, Zelauto was written to welcome Euphues into England; and Munday urges the reader to “like that Lilly whose sent is so sweete, and fauour his freend who wisheth your welfare” (p. 8). Apart from these allusions, however, there is little connection between the two, beside the general similarities in plot that I have already mentioned. If Munday tried to imitate Lyly's style, he succeeded only superficially. Certainly Zelauto was written in the same oratorical-dramatic tradition as Euphues. There are the formal orations and debates that derive from the rhetoric books, Italian courtesy literature and social customs, and imitations of the Platonic dialogue. The first two parts of the novel are printed as dialogue, generally with the speaker's name above each speech. But where Lyly makes moral treatises of his discourses, Munday more often than not has Zelauto tell of his adventures, so that his novel has considerably more action than Lyly's two novels combined.

As a rule the speeches in Zelauto are shorter than those in Euphues, and at times, especially in Part III, the dialogue becomes quite terse, as, for example, when Strabino tells Cornelia that a picture of his beloved is framed in the mirror he holds in his hand:

And haue you found her face there (quoth she). I pray you let me see her, to iudge if I know her. After Cornelia had looked a whyle, she sayd. Why Strabino, you promised I should see that seemely shee, to whom you owe such delightfull looue and loyaltie. And what I promised (quoth he) hath beene heere performed. As how (quoth she). Whose face (quoth he) did you behold when I shewed you? Why yours and mine owne (quoth she). I thought it would come to such a passe, well I will speake to her, and if she chaunce to giue her consent: doubt you not but you shall heare of it.

(pp. 131-32)

One would search far to find similar brevity in the earlier euphuistic novels. Even Munday's lengthiest discourses—those on excess, hospitality, religion, love—are shorter, less learned, less involved than Lyly's.

A comparison of the two novelists' eulogies of Elizabeth will illustrate some of their differences. Euphues' admiration for the queen runs to six pages in the Bond edition, and consists of purely abstract praise, as uninformative as it is tedious. Zelauto, on the other hand, says, “because I am vnable to paynt foorth her passing prayse, according as desert deserueth: I remyt her vnder the vayle of Eternall memorie, to the graue iudgement of others” (pp. 36-37)—and his eulogy nearly ends at its outset. Astraepho, of course, begs further description; yet the burden of Zelauto's tribute is carried in the story of the armed lady and the rude knight and in a poem of twenty-four lines that says as much as Lyly's six pages. Munday, moreover, supplies at least one factual detail: both writers praise the queen's linguistic ability, but where Lyly passes on to another topic Munday adds the following:

Also, it is not vnknowen, howe her Princely Maiestie made the minde of the valiant Marques Vitelli (Ambassador sent from the King of Spayne) to be marueylously mooued. This Vitelli, hath bene knowen a excellent warriour, and yet the rare excellencie of this Queene had almost put him cleane out of conceyt. That as he sayde him selfe: he was neuer so out of countenaunce before any Prince in all his lyfe.

(p. 37)

Munday's prose style is euphuistic to the extent that he uses alliteration, balance, and antithesis, strings of rhetorical questions, and proverbs and sententiae. There are none of the zoological similes characteristic of Pettie's and Lyly's writings, and classical and historical allusions are used more sparingly. Munday was not so clever as Lyly; consequently his prose is less artful and, as it happens, more lifelike. Elements of humor, entirely lacking in Lyly's work, result from the influences of the jestbook and Italian novella, as in the following description of Truculento:

The olde horson would needes be lusty, and to cheerishe vp his churlishe carkase, would get him a wanton Wife. And though I say it, he was as well made a man, and as curious in his quallities: as euer an olde Horse in this towne, when he is gnabling on a thystle. This carpet Knight, hauing pounced him selfe vp in his perfumes, and walking so nice on the ground, that he would scant bruse an Onion: comes to the house of Signor Giorolamo Ruscelli.

(p. 146)

Ruscelli's final dismissal of Truculento exhibits at once the balance of euphuism and the racy diction of the jestbook: “If you set not a poynt by vs: we care not a pyn for you, if we may haue your good will so it is: if not, keepe your winde to coole your Pottage” (p. 169). In his occasional use of colloquial diction and rapid dialogue in Part III, Munday looks forward to the sort of realism to be found in the novels of Deloney.

The many proverbs in Zelauto, which could have come mainly from John Heywood's Dialogue (1546) but occasionally also from Erasmus by way of translations like Richard Taverner's Proverbes (1539) and Nicholas Udall's Apophthegmes (1542), were the common property of Elizabethan writers. Munday's classical and historical learning could have come from a variety of sources, including contemporary reference dictionaries, Latin quotation books, and Thomas North's translation of Plutarch, published in 1579. The concentration of proverbs and historical allusions in the discourses on wealth and excess suggests that Munday may have referred to his own (now lost) Defence of pouertie againste the Desire of worldlie riches Dialogue wise, licensed by Charlewood on 18 November 1577.²¹ Most, perhaps all, of the allusions and similes that Munday used can be found in other English works, but not very many of them occur in any single earlier work. He borrowed almost nothing from Lyly or Pettie.²² One most reasonably would suppose that he worked from his commonplace book rather than from any specific printed source.

Like the novelists who preceded him, Munday was no master of characterization. Most of the characters in Zelauto are voices instead of people; minor characters like the three or four knights who accompany Zelauto are forgotten as soon as they are introduced. Generally the characters of Part III are more acceptable, owing no doubt to a difference in sources and influences. Zelauto is given some individuality. Indistinguishable from Euphues at first, he becomes less heroic and more like his practical author as the novel progresses. Addressing the Persian Sultan, he shows unwillingness to risk his life for the condemned lady: “I thinke it sufficient that you put her in exyle, with expresse charge in payne of death neuer to returne: so may your rigor be verie well asswaged, and shee for her paines indifferently penaunced” (p. 92). After describing the reluctance with which he killed the Sultan's son, he tells Astraepho: “But as you know your selfe, a man in such affayres, dealeth as best he can, for the sauegarde of him selfe, is his cheefest desire” (p. 97). Munday did not learn such practicality from the romances of chivalry. Cornelia, however, who in some ways compares well with Deloney's women, is the only real character of the novel. Gay, sprightly, and much more clever than Strabino, whose awkward advances she sees through immediately, she defies and out-argues her father in refusing to marry Truculento, and initiates the action that ultimately satisfies her father and foils Truculento. Presenting a somewhat realistic contrast to Strabino's courtly manner, she joins the stereotyped love plot of the first half of the story with the jestbook-novella situation of the last half. It is largely through her that Munday achieves his best dialogue.

Taking an over-all view of this hurriedly produced, unfinished work, one must say, finally, that its combination of such disparate influences as euphuism, chivalric romance, the pastoral, courtly love, the jestbook, and the novella, results at times in an almost fantastic disunity of style, tone, and theme. Though it has more action and at least one better character than Lyly's novels can show, it is easily surpassed in every respect by later novels, while Euphues remains the epitomizing example of euphuistic prose. Zelauto apparently had almost no influence on later fiction,²³ certainly none comparable to the influence that Munday's translations exerted. For all its mediocrity, however, the facts remain that its structure is an artistic improvement over the straightforward narrative plan of the novels that preceded it; that its combination of chivalric romance and pastoral motifs anticipates such really significant works as Sidney's Arcadia and Lodge's Rosalynde; and that its occasional passages of jestlike humor, colloquial diction, and rapid dialogue mark the beginning of the shift away from the artificiality of euphuism toward the realistic manner that was to flourish in the works of Nashe and Deloney. These are reasons enough for reprinting the novel.

Notes

1. The wording of its title page (“Giuen … to Euphues, at his late ariuall …”) suggests that Zelauto was published after Lyly's second novel; but elsewhere (pp. 7, 180 in the present edition) Munday speaks of welcoming Euphues into England, and the possibility should not be overlooked, since both Munday and Lyly were “seruaunts” to the Earl of Oxford, and each presumably knew of the other's work in advance, that Zelauto appeared first.

2. More than a hundred other titles were duly registered by Munday's publisher during the years 1575-85. Among uncertain entries for him, however, only one, “certen newes of the Turk” (29 October 1580), has even remote relevance to Zelauto (Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, II [London, 1875], 380). “Turkes” are mentioned twice in Part I, and all of Part II takes place among the Turks in Persia.

3. Trans. Elizabeth Lee (London, 1890), pp. 147-48.

4. “Zur Entstehung des ‘Kaufmann von Venedig,’” Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, XLIX, 97-121. The relationship between the two works, earlier pointed out by Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakspeare (London, 1807), I, 280, has been subsequently discussed by Janet Spens, An Essay on Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition (Oxford, 1916), pp. 16-24, and by Celeste Turner [Wright], Anthony Mundy: An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, 1928), pp. 32-34. (Mrs. Wright's biography is cited hereafter as “Turner.”) See also John Russell Brown, ed., The Merchant of Venice (London, 1955), pp. xxx-xxxi, 156-68; Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1957), 452-54, 486-90; and Kenneth Muir, Shakespeare's Sources, I (London, 1957), 49, 50.

5. Spens, pp. 17-22, and Turner, pp. 30-35, discuss style and give summaries; M. St. Clare Byrne, “Anthony Munday and His Books,” Library, 4th ser., I (1921), 250-51, briefly treats style; René Pruvost, Matteo Bandello and Elizabethan Fiction (Paris, 1937), pp. 265-67, 274-76, summarizes the plot and quotes three pages of Part III as an example of “sentimental rhetoric.”

6. Percy Waldron Long, “From Troilus to Euphues,” Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1913), pp. 367-76; Leicester Bradner, “The First English Novel: A Study of George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J.,” PMLA, XLV (1930), 543-52; Robert P. Adams, “Gascoigne's ‘Master F. J.’ as Original Fiction,” PMLA, LXXIII (1958), 315-26; Hyder E. Rollins, “John Grange's The Golden Aphroditis,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, XVI (1934), 177-98; William Ringler, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (Princeton, 1942), pp. 83-99.

7. The details of Munday's early life are assembled by Mrs. Wright in her biography (Turner, pp. 1-29) and in a recent article, “Young Anthony Mundy Again,” SP, LVI (1959), 150-68. On Rainolds' influence on the novelists see William Ringler's “The Immediate Source of Euphuism,” PMLA, LIII (1938), 678-86, and his introduction to Walter Allen's translation of Rainolds' Oratio in laudem artis poeticae (Princeton, 1940).

8. Munday's trip to Italy in 1578-79, highly relevant to Zelauto, has been discussed by Turner, pp. 16-23; by Miss Byrne, “The Date of Anthony Munday's Journey to Rome,” Library, 3rd ser., IX (1918), 106-15; and by Beatrice Hamilton Thompson, “Anthony Munday's Journey to Rome, 1578-9,” Durham University Journal, XXXIV (1941), 1-14. Munday himself wrote a book on his travels, The English Romayne Lyfe (1582), ed. G. B. Harrison, Bodley Head Quartos (London, 1925).

9. Parenthetical citations refer to pages in the present edition.

10. The reader lacks not only the rest of Zelauto's narration, but Astraepho's own “straunge aduentures” that he promises to tell (p. 20) when Zelauto has finished. Munday's explanation at the end of his dedicatory epistle—“The last part of this woorke remaineth vnfinished, the which for breuity of time, and speedines in the Imprinting: I was constrained to permit till more limitted leysure”—suggests that Zelauto was hurriedly produced and designed either to anticipate (and thereby to advertise) or to profit from the success of Lyly's second novel (see note 1, above). That the novel was never completed may be attributed to its unpopularity or to the fact that Munday shortly afterward became involved in pamphlet warfare concerning the stage, Catholic agents in England, and his own activities in Rome.

11. His enemies accused him of going as a spy to betray the English seminary at Rome. Modern scholars, following Thomas Seccombe in the DNB, generally suggest that he went in order to make literary capital out of whatever he could learn to the detriment of the English Catholics abroad. Mrs. Wright, however (SP, LVI [1959], 155), thinks that “Since his master [John Allde] and his publisher [John Charlewood] worked for Catholic noblemen, and his patron [Oxford] was a crypto-Catholic, there is now little doubt that he went as a convert, not a spy.”

12. Ed. G. B. Harrison (London, 1925), p. 2.

13. All these details may be found in Chapter I of The English Romayne Lyfe, pp. 1-17.

14. His translations of chivalric romances, which he turned out in volume after volume from around 1578 until a decade or so before his death, perhaps constitute his most important influence on English literature. See Gerald R. Hayes, “Anthony Munday's Romances of Chivalry,” Library, 4th ser., VI (1925), 57-81, VII (1926), 31-38; “The Chronology of Mundy's Romances” in Turner, pp. 180-83; and the many references to Munday in Mary Patchell, The “Palmerin” Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York, 1947), and in Henry Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry (Cambridge, Eng., 1920). At the beginning of the dedicatory epistle in Zelauto Munday alludes to several names and incidents of the Palmerin cycle; at its close he promises Oxford that shortly his translation of “the renowned Palmerin of England with all speede shall be sent you” (see the explanatory note to 6:19). Two minor characters in the novel, Pollinarda and Oriana, are named after heroines of the Palmerin cycle and Amadis of Gaul.

15. The chapters of Parts I and II are designated by long descriptive headings; in addition to these, chapter numbers are used in Part III.

16. It is also considerably longer. Parts I, II, and III occupy 51, 40, and 52 pages respectively in the 1580 quarto, but Parts I and II were enlarged with twenty-three woodcuts (see the explanatory note to 61:18), while Part III contained no illustrations.

17. John Weld, “Studies in the Euphuistic Novel (1576-1640)” (unpub. diss., Harvard, 1940), p. 144.

18. As a further complication, one might add a fourth general influence, that of the Italian commedia erudita, on which see Marvin T. Herrick, Italian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana, Ill., 1960), pp. 60-164.

19. Turner, p. 34, and Spens, pp. 23-24. Miss Spens's suggestion that Munday himself wrote the lost play will not hold up when the dates of his Italian journey and the extent of his literary production after returning to England are considered.

20. Turner, p. 34.

21. Arber, II, 320.

22. While Munday and Lyly or Pettie sometimes cite the same classical or historical names, their allusions are dissimilar. An exception is the allusion to Timanthes and Agamemnon's portrait (p. 36 of the present edition; The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond [Oxford, 1902], II, 22); but Lyly names the artist “Tamantes,” Munday “Timon” (corrected in the errata to read “Timantes”). Alluding (p. 144) to Pygmalion and Admetus, the heroes of Pettie's eleventh and sixth tales, Munday has the latter (instead of his beloved Alcestis) disguised in man's attire. In proverbs common to Munday and Lyly or Pettie, Munday's wording invariably follows some earlier writer's version.

23. Weld, p. 22, suggests that Zelauto furnished certain plot details in Henry Roberts' A Defiance to Fortune (1590).